THE GROWTH OF THE LIBERAL SOUL
by David Walsh
Chapter One: The Crisis of Liberal Politics
Part 2
David Walsh is professor of politics at Catholic University of America. He is the author or editor of many books; he is editor of three volumes of The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin. His Guarded by Mystery has been serialized here at VoegelinView in its entirety. His most recent book is The Modern Philosophical Revolution: The Luminosity of Existence. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. The Growth of the Liberal Soul is available from the University of Missouri Press and appears here with permission. "Crisis of Liberal Politics" appears here in five parts.
The Irony of Liberal Nihilism
The irony is that it was precisely the confrontation with totalitarian nihilism that provoked the contemporary rejuvenation of liberal convictions. We have difficulty remembering the extent to which the liberal ethos died in the period between the two world wars. The Great War had discredited the nineteenth-century brand of liberal politics that had seemed so helpless to avoid the conflagration. Social and economic upheavals that reached a crescendo in the Great Depression seemed to have sealed the fate of liberal economics. Even the historically stable democracies of the West appeared to be in a prerevolutionary state. Communist and fascist movements were not exclusively a German or Italian or Slavic phenomenon. Ideological mass movements were to be found in most of the countries of Europe and the Americas.
The realization of the destructiveness of such movements if they were to attain power was the shock that jolted liberal democracies back to life. Suddenly, liberals discovered that they were unarmed, militarily and spiritually, against far more vigorous opponents. Faced with movements that inspired fanatical commitment, with members that were willing to kill and be killed for the cause they overwhelmingly believed in, liberal democracies discovered the depth of their own ambivalence. Having drifted along as the danger mounted before it, liberal societies and liberal intellectuals suddenly awoke to the realization that history was about to pass them by. Without any apparent deep, sustaining convictions they were no longer a match for the more vital revolutionary forces of the day.
Something of the shock that stirred the liberal democracies into life on the eve of the Second World War can be sensed in T. S. Eliot's lecture "The Idea of a Christian Society." The craven capitulation of the Western powers before the demands of Hitler at Munich was the event that brought home the depth of the problem. It made clear the severity of the liberal crisis to "the many persons who, like myself, were deeply shaken by the events of September 1938, in a way from which one does not recover; perhaps to whom that month brought a profounder realization of a general plight." More than a political crisis, he understood in the events of Munich the eruption of a spiritual crisis, for they had cast "a doubt about the validity of a civilization."
We could not match conviction with conviction, we had no ideas with which we could meet or oppose the ideas opposed to us. Was our society, which had always been so assured of its superiority and rectitude, so confident of its unexamined premises, assembled around anything more permanent than a congeries of banks, insurance companies and industries, and had it any beliefs more essential than a belief in compound interest and the maintenance of dividends?6
The crisis revealed failures beyond any errors in government and called for a response beyond the purely political. Betrayal and humiliation could be surmounted only by contrition and repentance. Eliot called in his lecture for the revival of the idea of a Christian society as the only adequate spiritual support for the superstructure of a liberal political order. This is a call that was to be echoed by many thinkers in the postwar period. The confrontation with totalitarianism had convinced them that liberal democracy needed, if not a religious foundation, something approaching a political creed if it was to have the inner strength to withstand its implacable ideological opponents.7
More broadly, an effort at energetic rearticulation was undertaken, largely inspired by the impression that liberal principles had never been adequately defended. The suspicion that liberal order had declined because it had never been elaborated with sufficient force or consistency gave rise to an impressive succession of liberal retheorizations. Some of them, such as Karl Popper's 1945 The Open Society and Its Enemies, were not the most felicitous in the judgments hurled across the centuries of the history of philosophy, but there was no denying the depth of commitment to the defense of the "open society" — however ill defined.
A similar predilection for conviction over logic characterizes Isaiah Berlin's famous distinction between positive and negative freedom. He makes it clear that the dangers of the misuse of positive freedom to justify all manner of totalitarian abuse, invoking Rousseau's unfortunate dictum of "forcing men to be free," are so great that he would prefer to yield the intellectual defense rather than surrender the defense of principle. Berlin quotes approvingly Schumpeter's nostrum: "To realize the relative validity of one's convictions and yet stand for them unflinchingly is what distinguishes a civilized man from a barbarian."8
Even more impressive is the great restatement of classical liberal principles that we find in Friedrich Hayek's The Constitution of Liberty. Hayek, too, had begun with the critique of the ideological alternatives to the liberal tradition. His Road to Serfdom was one of the earliest and most trenchant warnings of the inevitably totalitarian nature of socialism. The Constitution of Liberty was likewise a pioneering defense of liberal political philosophy and one of the first to demonstrate the intellectual and moral credibility of that tradition. Hayek anchored his account in the notion of the rule of law that applies equally to all, thereby guaranteeing the equal enjoyment of liberty by all. "The conception of freedom under law that is the chief concern of this book rests on the contention that when we obey laws, in the sense of general abstract rules laid down irrespective of their application to us, we are not subject to another man's will and are therefore free" (153). Anything else is merely the discretionary activity of authority that, by definition, is arbitrary and unlimited by any rule. He shows how this principle can provide the connecting thread that weaves together all the major elements of the liberal worldview: economic, social, political, and historical. It is again powerful testament to the vitality of the liberal faith that inspires it, although it stops short of a more philosophic articulation of the sources of that faith itself. We must after all be convinced that we ought to follow the rule of law and that the liberal values are themselves worth defending.
The following generation took up this challenge of a more philosophical defense of liberal ideas. For the past twenty years we have witnessed a proliferation of increasingly sophisticated approaches to the justification of liberal principles. Dominating the conversation has been John Rawls's A Theory of Justice, which probably deserves most of the accolades heaped upon it for the simple reason that it is the only work that outlines a comprehensive philosophy of liberal order. Most of the others focus on more specific problems within the whole, but Rawls is the one who defines the whole and thereby identifies what the problems are.
Within contemporary Anglophone philosophy where all of the emphasis has been on discrete technical analyses of problems—in the expectation that somehow, somewhere, someday all of the solutions will accumulate into a whole — Rawls provides an invigorating rediscovery of the power of theory. Analytic liberal philosophers were not condemned to deal with ever more fragmented aspects of problems. They could now envision what a liberal theory might look like, even if Rawls was not right on many of the specifics of obligation, contract, natural justice, and so on. The need for additional nuance and refinements did not obviate the success in constructing a whole. Almost for the first time since Mill and perhaps even longer, the liberal tradition acquired intellectual credibility. Its principles had not simply been cobbled together by history and common sense; now they cohered.
The success of Rawls naturally inspired emulation. While there have been few grand theorists, there has certainly been a much higher, more serious, and less purely technical level of debate in the past two decades. Works such as Robert Nozick's Anarchy, State and Utopia attracted well-deserved attention as expositions of what a minimal, libertarian justification of liberal principles might look like. Alan Gewirth, in Reason and Morality, provided a persuasive account of the way in which a revised Kantianism could provide the noncontroversial foundation long sought for liberal morality and politics. Ronald Dworkin, in Taking Rights Seriously and Law's Empire, carried forth Rawls's emphasis on the primacy of rights — especially "equal concern and respect" — to show how it constitutes the guiding principle of the liberal legal order.
With the many other examples that could also have been cited, it is evident that we have been living through one of the great periods of liberal theorizing.9 To the formidable array of liberal talent must also be added the even more extensive range of individuals who sought the renewal of liberal democracy from other sources. Dissatisfied with the atomistic individualism inherent in liberal thought, the communitarian perspective has been effectively articulated by such thinkers as Charles Taylor and Michael Sandel. Jacques Maritain and the natural-law theorists, who have included such impressive recent representatives as Alasdair Maclntyre and John Finnis, have continued to mine the Thomist tradition for a more substantive foundation. Eric Voegelin, Leo Strauss, Hans Gadamer, and (somewhat more idiosyncratically) Hannah Arendt sought in the encounter with classical political philosophy the reorientation that would ultimately rejuvenate liberal democracy. The revival of an intellectually powerful conservatism, as in Michael Oakeshott and others, has been clearly directed toward the reconceptualization of liberal ideas and practice. And perhaps just as significant has been the steady stream of returnees from the social left, bearing every conceivable banner from socialism to postmodernism, who regard a reformed liberal ethos as the best practical hope of realizing their ideals.
Yet despite the formidable range and depth of efforts reaching back more than half a century, we are still no closer to a consensus on the meaning and justification of a liberal order. Indeed, we seem to have slipped further away from it. The crisis of the liberal tradition has mounted. While repairs and rejuvenations have occurred, the secular movement has continued down toward disintegration. This is all the more disheartening in light of the resilience and fortitude that liberal societies have demonstrated in the struggles they have endured. It is surely one of the supreme ironies of history that, having won the third great war of the century, the Cold War, the liberal democracies now suffer from a growing crisis of confidence in their own values. Contrary to the briefly famous fantasies of the "end of history," our situation more resembles the repeat of history in the slow decline of Rome after the defeat of Carthage.10
Liberal philosophy has, of course, always been prone to becoming a victim of its own success. Its self-understanding has from the start been defined by the opponent to which it is opposed. First it was feudalism and aristocratic privilege, then it was absolutism and arbitrary rule, and in our own time the forces of totalitarian democracy. Deprived of a foe, it seems perennially inclined to relax its discipline and unwind toward a state approaching chaos; faced with an enemy, it initially appears weaker than it is and is perpetually inclined to tempt aggression. The inability to maintain anything like an equilibrium, in other words, is a problem that lies deep within the nature of the liberal ethos. The failure of the enormous range of efforts, theoretical and practical, that we have surveyed is not surprising. The propensity of the liberal tradition for crisis cannot be resolved through argument. Its roots lie deeper still.
Neither the periodic reinvigorations of liberal society nor the continuing struggle to find an intellectually compelling justification have been sufficient to stop the endemic unraveling tendencies of liberalism. The instability is not purely institutional or conceptual. As a consequence, the remedy cannot lie simply in institutional, social, or political reforms or in the development of arguments of impenetrable brilliance. Liberals typically have behaved as if such steps were indeed all that was needed to bring about Utopian perfection or something very close to it. But it is not enough to have a clear and compelling argument, for that will not lead irresistibly toward the transformation of politics. Nor will the reform of laws and institutions lead willy-nilly to political improvement, unless they are accompanied by an underlying improvement of the spirit of those who operate them. The most crucial dimension of any order, Montesquieu recognized, was the "spirit of the laws."
It is the neglect of this spiritual or moral dimension that is the source of the liberal instability. Alternating between license and discipline, coherence and incoherence, it has suggested to many critics that liberal politics is bereft of any existential core. Such a judgment hardly stands up to the formidable resilience we have just acknowledged. But it does point at least to the right level of analysis. It is not that liberal order lacks a moral or existential foundation in the lived experience of both masses and elites. Indeed, it is one of the principal objects of this study to demonstrate the presence and significance of such a living consensus as the only foundation upon which we can rely. The problem more specifically is that liberal theory and practice studiously avoid attending to their own existential roots. It is almost as if the neglect is willful; more in the manner of a flight from reality, it is uncomfortable with contemplating. That, of course, is an existential and not simply an intellectual error, as the most perceptive critics of the liberal orientation have long understood.
The question is whether the flight from the spirit so characteristic of the liberal ethos can be reversed. Is there a possibility of an existential turning around that would reorder the nature of liberal politics? Or is the unraveling process that we have seen proceed apace, despite the periodic reversals, destined to reach its denouement? The question ultimately is an attempt to probe the condition of the contemporary liberal soul. What is the state of its resources? Having endured so much, does it now have within itself the capacity to rise again from the ashes of its own dissolution? Or is it to suffer the final irony of its history that, having defeated the totalitatian emperor, it now finds that it too is without clothes?
Liberalism without Clothes
Enemies, like friends, come to resemble one another. The difficulty is that their long-standing enmity prevents them from recognizing the extent to which they have become alike. A first step in any attempt to understand the nature of contemporary liberal order is to break free of the received patterns of thought. Any political science worthy of the name cannot afford to take the categories of ideological conflict for granted. While the world has been divided into ideological blocs for much of the twentieth century, this does not mean that we have been living in the rhetorically different "worlds." Totalitarianism has not been a phenomenon in one corner. We have not lived through a gnostic war of good and evil, light and dark. Rather it has been a struggle against a common enemy — the evil of totalitarianism — that has infected different parts to different extents. The less seriously infected have mercifully been able to rally the forces of resistance that seem eventually to have exhausted the disease, but no segment can claim immunity from its effects. Western liberal democracy has demonstrated its moral superiority to the totalitarian ideologies, but that must not be allowed to conceal the degree of Western responsibility for the horror. Besides the efforts of heroic resistance there have also been the shameful episodes of collaboration with all the butchers of the twentieth century.11 The moral darkness of totalitarianism has also made itself felt not infrequently in the liberal West.
Viewed in this context, the suspicion of nihilism as the truth of the liberal tradition comes as no surprise. It is only shocking to liberals themselves who had always assumed that they stood for something more. In this sense, the crisis of liberal politics that has culminated in the recognition of its own nakedness is a blessing in disguise. It enables liberal intellectuals and societies to come to grips with their identity with a clarity unique in their history. They must now confront not just the nihilism of their opponents, but the beam of darkness that has lain hidden in their own souls. Perhaps they might even begin to reflect on the degree of their own collusion in the evil of the century we are leaving behind. Instead of triumphalism, we might begin to revise our understanding to see our own role in the events as that of accomplices, as much in need of repentance as those whom we opposed. Finally, we might begin to understand the modern civilization itself from which both of us have sprung and recognize that the fatality of power without purpose has been the common darkness from which we have all suffered.12 The possibility of breaking free from its influence begins with such an understanding of its appeal.
Like the rest of the modern world, the liberal tradition can only overcome its own nihilism by going through and beyond it. This is the prescription of Nietzsche who called himself "the first perfect nihilist of Europe who, however, has even now lived through the whole of nihilism, to the end, leaving it behind, outside himself" (The Will to Power, 3). It was this willingness to confront the problems at their deepest level, in the soul of modern man, that enabled the most clear-sighted, such as Dostoyevsky and Nietzsche, to foresee the disasters that lay in the future.13 At the height of the liberal nineteenth century, Nietzsche understood the extent to which " 'moral man' is dressed up, how he is veiled behind moral formulas and concepts of decency" because he cannot bear to appear naked (The Gay Science, 295). But the truth was that the clothes of his morality had completely worn out. Nothing was more insubstantial than "the most threadbare and despised ideas [of liberalism]: equal rights and universal suffrage" (Will to Power, 396).
Nietzsche seems to harbor a particular scorn for the very unreflective capacity of the liberal tradition that enables it to soldier on when the whole world seems to be crumbling around it. This was best exemplified for him in the "English twaddle (niaiserie anglaise)" of John Stuart Mill and his compatriots. Mill's conception of liberty, "Do not unto others what you would not have them do unto you," struck Nietzsche as the height of vulgarity, of the herd mentality. It bore no resemblance to the real world where a Corsican's honor would demand a vendetta, and the probability of getting shot would not deter his efforts at revenge in the slightest (Will to Power, 488). The liberal guarantees of equal freedom would work only among a people that no longer believed in honor. They could be controlled by manipulating the small pleasures and pains of their petty existence.
The picture of this oppressive liberal apocalypse was brilliantly captured in Nietzsche's portrait of "the last man." When Zarathustra has failed in all his efforts to rouse his listeners to the new life he proclaims to them, he finally tries to insult their pride by portraying their future as the "most contemptible" of men. They are men who are no longer men, having turned away from struggle with the great questions. All that they can do is blink mindlessly. They do not want to know "What is love? What is creation? What is longing? What is a star?" More like an ineradicable swarm of flea beetles, they have turned away from all that is challenging and difficult.
Becoming sick and harboring suspicion are sinful to them: one proceeds carefully. A fool, whoever still stumbles over stones or human beings! A little poison now and then: that makes for agreeable dreams. And much poison in the end, for an agreeable death.
One still works, for work is a form of entertainment. But one is careful lest the entertainment be too harrowing. One no longer becomes poor cinch: both require too much exertion. Who still wants to rule? Who obey? Both require too much exertion. No shepherd and one herd! Everybody wants the same, everybody is the same: whoever feels different goes voluntarily into a madhouse.
"Formerly, all the world was mad," say the most refined, and they blink.
One is clever and knows everything that has ever happened: so there is no end of derision. One still quarrels, but one is soon reconciled—else it might spoil the digestion.
One has one's little pleasure for the day and one's little pleasure for the night: but one has a regard for health.
"We have invented happiness," say the last men and they blink. (Thus Spoke Zarathustra, 18)
The portrait is chillingly close to the kind of cocooned existence that has become the unquestioned goal of liberal democratic societies today. Insulated from all the risks and pains of human existence we become satisfied with our measured quality of life, until we are prepared to go all too "gently into that good night." We know the seductive appeal of comfort and, most telling of all, are not shocked by the response Zarathustra receives. "Give us this last man, O Zarathustra," they shouted.
The truth, of course, is that this is not a mere aberration of liberal aspirations. It is a logical outgrowth of the modest range of virtues that a liberal ethos promotes. In place of the old ideals of heroism, self-sacrifice, and honor, there are the more moderate practices of restraint, consideration, and caution. The difficulty is that the contraction of the virtues to those of the liberal gentleman was a process of shrinkage likely to continue, until all that was admirable in human character had shriveled up. In the absence of the supererogatory ideals, of the hero and the saint, there was no counterbalancing pull against the seductive enervations of materialism.
This was a problem noted by many of the leading nineteenth-century liberal theorists, including, it should be noted, John Stuart Mill. Alexis de Tocqueville comes closest to Nietzsche's contempt for the impoverished range of aspirations in the newly populous bourgeoisie. What they most needed was not humility but pride, a more enlarged idea of themselves. "I would willingly exchange several of our small virtues for this one vice" (Democracy in America, 2:262). Tocqueville too contemplates the depressing prospect of a society of petty hedonists. In a passage that sounds remarkably like Nietzsche's castigations against the soul-destroying effect of equality, he concludes with an unforgettable metaphor of the process.
The reproach I address to the principle of equality is not that it leads men away in the pursuit of forbidden enjoyments, but that it absorbs them wholly in quest of those which are allowed. By these means a kind of virtuous (honnête) materialism may ultimately be established in the world, which would not corrupt, but enervate, the soul and noiselessly unbend its springs of action (ressorts). (141)
The problems were, as Tocqueville suspected, and as Nietzsche made searingly clear, deeper than the influence of equality. The disappearance of the great overarching virtues of the Western moral tradition was itself only a symptom of the much deeper crisis of the spirit engulfing the modern world. The very foundations of morality had collapsed. This was the news that Nietzsche's prophet proclaims and valiantly struggles to overcome, even though he is greeted with incomprehension. Like the madman who bursts into the marketplace in search of God, he encounters only derision from the passersby. They do not understand the enormity of the moment or of their own responsibility within it. Even though they are themselves the murderers of God, they have not yet asked themselves: "What did we do when we unchained this earth from its sun? Whither is it moving now? Whither are we moving now? Away from all suns? Are we not plunging continually? . . . Are we not straying as through an infinite nothing? . . . What was holiest and most powerful of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our weapons. Who will wipe this blood off?" We are not yet ready to contemplate the question that the murder of God forces upon us: "Must not we ourselves become gods simply to seem worthy of it?" (Gay Science, 181-82). 
[This is part 2 of a five part article. Part 1 may be read HERE].
NOTES
6. T. S. Eliot, The Idea of a Christian Society. New York: Harcourt, Brace. 1940, 5. A more philosophic elaboration of the same conclusion emerges in John Hallowell's Decline of Liberalism As an Ideology. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1943, although characteristically Hallowell is proposing the rejuvenation of liberal democracy ten years later in The Moral Foundation of Democracy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1954.
7. See, for example, Jacques Maritain, Man and the State. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1951; Michael Polanyi, The Logic of Liberty.Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1951; and Friedrich Hayek, The Constitution of Liberty. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960.
8. Isaiah Berlin, Four Essays on Liberty. New York: Oxford University Press, 1969,172. Karl Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies. 2 vols. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1972.
9. Other notable examples of liberal theorizing certainly include Joseph Raz, The Morality of Freedom. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986; Richard E. Flathman, The Philosophy and Politics of Freedom. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987; Bruce Ackerman, Social Justice in the Liberal State. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981; Stephen Macedo, Liberal Virtues. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990, and William Galston, Liberal Purposes: Goods, Virtues and Diversity in the Liberal State. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991; a representative example of the high level of recent symposia on the character of liberal order is R. Bruce Douglas, Gerald M. Mara, and Henry S. Richardson, eds., Liberalism and the Good, New York: Routledge, 1990.
10. The thesis that liberal democracy represents the end point of political development in light of the disappearance of its last ideological rival has been developed by Francis Fukuyama in The End of History and the Last Man. New York: Free Press, 1992.
11. Western knowledge of the Nazi Holocaust, it has been established, was extensive, but it is only with the Stalinist holocaust that Western cooperation rose to the level of active participation. This was in the shameful forced repatriation of approximately two million Soviet citizens who were in the West after the conclusion of hostilities, as part of an agreement with Stalin. Those that did not commit suicide along the way were immediately dispatched to the Communist concentration camps.
12. The air of foreboding that hangs over modern civilization began to receive profound expression in the nineteenth century, especially with the pessimism of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, as well as in the more historical reflections of Tocqueville, Burckhart, and Spengler. Even an American thinker, such as Orestes Brownson, could detect the connection between nihilism and totalitarianism then being forged. See Gregory Butler, In Search of the American Spirit: The Political Thought of Orestes Brownson, Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1992. In our own century it has become commonplace to view the horror of the totalitarian convulsion through its relationship to the modern civilization that has produced it. See Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1968; Eric Voegelin, The New Science of Politics and From Enlightenment to Revolution; Albert Camus, The Rebel. Trans. Anthony Bower. New York: Vintage, 1956; Alexander Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago. Trans. Thomas Whitney. 3 vols. New York: Harper and Row, 1974-1978.
13. See Henri de Lubac, The Drama of Atheist Humanism. Trans. Edith M. Riley. New York: New American Library, 1950; David Walsh, After Ideology: Recovering the Spiritual Foundations of Freedom. San Francisco: Harper Collins, 1990.
